Ultra-high-power lasers open new pathways for non-destructive material inspection

Superman’s X-ray vision isn’t actually that super. X-rays work well for seeing through thin objects or medical scans, but thick concrete walls and dense lead shields block them completely.

Physicists have found a solution in muons, which are heavy subatomic particles created using powerful lasers that can easily pass through dense materials that stop X-rays in their tracks.

A Romanian research team at the Extreme Light Infrastructure—Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, led in part by Mădălina Dobre, has successfully used an artificial, laser-driven muon beam to image an object for the first time.

Artificially generated muon beams with adjustable properties offer significant utility for scanning dense objects that block other imaging techniques.

Next-gen scanning

Cosmic muons naturally form in Earth’s upper atmosphere and penetrate deep into solid structures, enabling non-destructive imaging of hidden interiors.

Earlier, “muography” mapped hidden internal structures, such as the secret chamber discovered inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2023. However, scan times remain impractically slow because the natural stream of these cosmic particles arrives so gradually.

Facilities currently produce lower-energy beams using traditional particle accelerators, whereas higher-energy muons require laser-wakefield-accelerated electrons interacting with solid targets.

Researchers at Romania’s Horia Hulubei National Institute have now solved this speed challenge by producing images with an artificial muon beam for the first time. Their laser-driven technique generates controlled particle streams on demand, opening the door to fast and reliable practical imaging.

Dobre’s team produced the first image dominated by artificial, laser-driven muons using the high-power laser at Romania’s ELI-NP facility. The laser accelerated electrons through a gas, directing them into a solid target to create light bursts that generated muon pairs.

After filtering out unwanted particles with plastic, paraffin, and a 2-meter-thick concrete wall, detectors located in a van recorded the shadow of a lead brick pile. Comparing these measurements with computer simulations confirmed that roughly 90%of the detected high-energy particles were muons matching the source model.

“By comparing the data with Monte Carlo simulations, we confirm that the measured beam profile and object imaging are consistent with artificially produced muons of energy of a few GeV. To our knowledge, this represents the first demonstration of imaging dominated by an artificial, laser-driven muon beam,” the team wrote in the preprint study paper version.

On-demand deep scans for infrastructure

The initial pictures aren’t sharp yet. They are grainy, low-resolution, and look more like crude shadows than high-definition scans.

Yet, the proof of concept changes everything. Natural cosmic ray muography yields only about 1 muon per square centimeter per second. Laser-driven bursts can produce millions of particles in split seconds, drastically reducing scan times.

Generating concentrated muon beams on demand shrinks a timeline that once took half a year down to mere minutes. Future iterations could allow engineers to scan aging bridges, help geologists map underground mineral deposits, and give border inspectors a way to spot heavily shielded nuclear material hidden deep inside shipping containers.

Volcanologists could use the technology to map internal magma chambers and lava tubes to help predict eruptions.

Source: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/ultra-high-power-lasers-penetrate-concrete